Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR VEGAN LUNCH BOX
Jennifer McCanns cookbook makes vegan cooking accessible and fun. Its informative but not stuffy, detailed yet concise, and the recipes are creative without being difficult. There are so many delicious, well put together options here, its not only perfect for kids but for anyone who ever eats lunch!
Isa Chandra Moskowitz, author of VEGANOMICON
Being a vegan kid just got a lot easier! The menus in Vegan Lunch Box make it easy to plan a balanced and nutritious lunch for your kids (or yourself!). The variety alone makes it worth having.
Erin Pavlina, author of
RAISING VEGAN CHILDREN IN A NON-VEGAN WORLD
Destined to become a classic, this is the book vegan parents have been waiting for. And who knew? A vegan mom started a blog describing the lunches she made for her son for one school year, and it won the 2006 Bloggie Award for Best Food Blog (NOT best VEGETARIAN food blog, but Best Food Blog, period!). It inspired, delighted, and motivated not only vegan parents, but omnivores bored with their own lackluster lunches. This book will continue delighting with recipes that are as innovative, kid-pleasing, and healthful as they are delicious.
Bryanna Clark Grogan, author of NONNAS ITALIAN KITCHEN
Give children a healthy dose of the truth, and I believe most of them will hop, skip, and jump over to the side of the angels and never look back.
Howard Lyman, NO MORE BULL!
Acknowledgments
THANKS...
To all the visitors to the Vegan Lunch Box blogeveryone who left behind a kind word, voted for me, tested recipes, and asked me to be their mom (okay, now go clean your room).
To my friends Elizabeth Schroeder, Linda Frederick, and Chelee Ellis for recipe testing; Martie Sahuc for inspiring me with her story; Joshua Ploeg for the Satya gig; Renee Pottle for your wisdom, help, and inspiration. To Dione Ruff-Sloan, Tina Stephenson, Amy Nylund, and Candace dObrenovic for their contributions.
To Erik Marcus, Erin Pavlina, and Dreena Burton, for your mentoring and advice, and for all the vital work you do. To PETA for the Proggy Award and VegNews for the Veg Webby Award.
Very special thanks to Diane Molleson for all her help.
To my whole family: with love to my husband, Greg, for his photography, advice, support, encouragement, and for putting up with me; to my mom, Susan Moore, for teaching me to cook with love, and to Ted Moore for all the asparagus; to my dad, David Andrews, for desert hikes and Adobe advice, and to Wilma Andrews for her spirit; to my aunt, Julie Adamson, for teaching me to love sushi; and to my sister-in-law Rachel Andrews, for stuffed peppers and recipe testing.
... and most of all, to my son, James Henry. Thanks for being such a good eater.
Foreword by Erik Marcus
No matter how good a mothers intentions, it will often seem that the world doesnt want children to be vegan. From birthday parties to day camp outings, being a child in America means being offered animal products dozens of times each year. And of all the hazards facing the vegan child, none compares to what happens every day during the school lunch period.
School cafeterias are enemy territory to vegetarian and vegan kids. Nearly all these cafeterias serve as the dumping grounds for the commodity meat and dairy products purchased by the USDAs price support program. Whats worse, meat industry lobbyists have succeeded in shaping the National School Lunch Programs nutritional guidelines, so that protein requirements and saturated fat allowances are kept unreasonably high. In consequence, most school cafeterias serve meals that resemble some Frankensteinian mishmash of all the worst foods McDonalds, Taco Bell, and Long John Silvers have to offer. Breaded nuggets and french fries, anyone?
This insanely unhealthy system seems destined to crumble within the next generation, but thats little comfort to vegan mothers whose children are starting school today. It was in exactly this situation that Jennifer McCann found herself back in 2005. Her seven-year-old son, James, was starting the first grade. Soon, every afternoon, he would find himself in the school cafeteria watching his friends and classmates devour cheeseburgers, pizza, and fried chicken. What could Jennifer send her son to school with each day that would ensure he wouldnt feel tempted to eat like the other kids?
The answer: give James a lunch that is bettermuch betterthan anything served to his classmates. And by better, I dont simply mean healthierI mean better in every respect. Every school day, Jennifer cooks up a miniature four-course meal that trumps the cafeterias offerings in terms of flavor, color, texture, creativity, and especially love. She packages these meals in snazzy, Japanese-style bento lunch-boxes and also frequently relies on a Thermos for soups, sauces, and cold drinks.
Every mother must worry that, by not eating like other kids, their children will be isolated and even ridiculed for their diet. But Jamess lunches have made him anything but a pariah. His classmates know great-looking food when they see it, and so his lunches have made James the envy of his school.
Appreciation for Jamess lunches extends well beyond the walls of his cafeteria. In 2005, Jennifer started her blog at veganlunchbox .com. And with that, James has become not just the envy of his fellow first graders but the poster boy for an international audience of thousands of kids, parents, and other lovers of great food. Each school day, Jennifer posts a photo of her latest offering, complete with write-up, cooking summary, and notes on what James ate, didnt eat, loved, hated, or merely tolerated. Based on Jamess evaluations, Jennifer awards each meal from one to five stars. Every recipe in this book has been rated five starscertification of absolute James approval.
If it sounds like, over the course of each school year, James samples hundreds of different foods, well, thats absolutely correct. Where a typical seven-year-old might think a corn dog exemplifies gourmet creativity, little James has already experienced vastly more foods than a typical American eats in an entire lifetime. Hes dined on Mexican flautas, Japanese vegan sushi, Irish stew, and a seemingly unending variety of other foods. As you can see, James has absolutely no cause to feel left out when the lunch bell rings each dayrather, its his classmates who are envious.
Jamess lunches help to illustrate exactly whats gone wrong with the National School Lunch Program, and how this dire situation could quickly be remedied. We would never tolerate an elementary school that failed to teach its students to read, to add and subtract, and to know something of history and geography. But in most American schools, the learning stops when the lunch bell rings. Upon shuffling into the cafeteria, students are expected to eat a limited selection of unimaginative foods day after day after day. Probably the most pernicious aspect of the National School Lunch Program isnt the myriad shortcomings of the food, but rather its uncanny knack for pushing even the brightest and most curious students into accepting, and then expecting, repetitive and uncreative meals.
By the time I finished high school, there were scarcely two dozen foods I regularly ateand nearly all these foods were loaded with meat and dairy products. Jennifer was not going to let this happen to her son, and the daily lunches she fixes have made all the difference. Say words like falafel, roti, penne, or pad thai to most seven-year-olds, and youll be asked what language youre speaking. But to James, foods like these are all in a days eating.
